The Antlers – ‘Familiars’

The Antlers - 'Familiars'

Score

Horn sections and jazz tinges brood on the Brooklyn trio's fifth

On the best bits of 2011’s ‘Burst Apart’, The Antlers resembled the duskier moments of Wild Beasts and Grizzly Bear. Here, on their fifth album, the Brooklyn trio sound emboldened, finding room for horn sections and plaintive piano lines amid the murk. While ‘Hotel’’s yearning vocal and the spidery, Cure-esque melodies that open ‘Palace’ are still the work of distinctly delicate souls, there’s an added confidence to ‘Familiars’. It’s typified by ‘Doppelgänger’, the record’s brooding highlight, which is a sprawling seven-minuter that’s the almost jazz-tinged soundtrack to walking down the kind of drizzly, seedy New York street where all the neon lights are half-broken and hope is nowhere to be seen. Familiar, yes, but The Antlers still have some exciting tricks up their sleeves.